Kirsty Best

Qualifications

B.A., (Concordia), Ph.D., (RMIT)

Research areas:

• Social, political and cultural aspects of new media
• User experiences of communication technology
• Illness and computer use
• Qualitative research and textual analysis
• Politics of digital control, including privacy, surveillance and digital rights management
• Alternative digital cultures, including collaborative computing, hacking, Creative Commons, open source, blogging, wikis, Web 2.0
• Cultural politics and democratic communication
• Online relationships

Ongoing Research:

Isolation, illness and the Internet: Exploring the possibility of a second life for sufferers of ME
Discovery Grant, Australian Research Council, 2009, $236.000 over 3 years
Chief Investigator

Many people who suffer from chronic illnesses find one of their greatest challenges to be high levels of social isolation. Conditions such as Myalgic Encephalopathy, Multiple Sclerosis, and even advancing age create a situation where sufferers are limited in their ability to communicate and interact with the wider community. On the one hand, the Internet might provide a solution to this isolation by allowing sufferers to tap into broader cultural and community networks. On the other hand, these conditions often go hand-in-hand with cognitive impairment which makes computer use extremely challenging.
This study will analyze this inherent tension. The research team’s central intuition is that the Internet can become a powerful tool for sufferers of isolating conditions, but only if the specific challenges of navigation and disorientation in virtual space are understood from the perspective of the sufferers themselves. The study will test whether this hypothesis is born out by sufferers’ actual experiences of computer use, online communication and virtual worlds.
The study will focus on the experiences of sufferers of Myalgic Encephalopathy (ME) in negotiating this tension. The team will surface the embodied, contextual and lived experiences of ME sufferers, and make sense of these experiences using an approach informed by cultural and social understandings of technology. While this study targets an important health issue, it addresses broad and significant cultural questions of communication and belonging. The project aims to produce new knowledge regarding the potential of Internet use to overcome the experience of isolation associated with chronic illness. 

Interfaces, Information and Technological Consent.
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2005, $67,604 over 3 years
Chief Investigator

This project looks at the relationship between a sense of control over technology and the ability to be controlled through our technologies. In some senses, the screen, as a visual technology which is becoming ever more user-friendly, increases our ability to control our technological environments. But at the same time, we are at a further remove from the internal workings of our digital devices, becoming less and less aware of capabilities for surveillance and other forms of digital management encoded into our systems. I’m interested in the relationship between these two aspects of control. I’m investigating a series of related devices: what I term digital screen technologies. These include obvious choices such as computers, but also various portable devices such as mobile phones and PDAs, and urban devices such as ATM machines and EFTPOS devices. I’m engaged in qualitative research in the form of in-depth interviews which probe users’ relationships of control with their technologies, their experiences and descriptions of technological affordances, and their attitudes toward privacy and surveillance. I’m also employing textual and policy analysis of digital screen technologies as sites of usage and regulation. On the one hand, this is a theoretical and empirical study of design and implementation of information control—how control is activated, transformed, delegated as well as made plausible, comfortable and invisible. On the other, it is a cultural mapping of emerging and ubiquitous screen-based technologies, and an investigation of the incorporation and experience of information control in everyday life.

The Filtered Encounter
Research Excellence Grant Scheme
Chief Investigator

I am also working on another project with two colleagues at Murdoch investigating online relationships, particularly the use of dating sites such as RSVP: what we term relationship portals. Since Manual Castell’s influential study The Network Society, commentators have assumed that the primary social use of new technologies is to foster connections. We argue this is a limited vision which fails to fully understand the nature of new technology. The current age is one characterized by information plenty, not information scarcity. People using technology to facilitate meeting and managing relationships are faced with this situation. Our aim is to research the prevalence, pragmatism and social impact of these filtering mechanisms. The project is shedding light on questions of digital and personal (in)security, the changing face of public and private sites, and the nature and experience of information control. Our approach is novel because neither the literature on mediated relationship management nor the broader literature on online communication has fully grasped the part played by filters. As a marketing device, a user strategy and a form of normative control, filtering is a real and powerful force. With this project, we are unpacking the broader social, cultural and political implications of these forms of control in a world increasingly interested in boundaries, policing and security.

Other research

Other work of mine has investigated cultural forms of activism and new forms of democracy developing in relation to computer networking, particularly the Internet. In the process, I have examined various cultures of hacking, virus writing, the open software movement, the Y2K bug, the Internet stock bubble and the (anti)globalization movement.

Some Recent Publications:

Best, K. (2008) Invalid Command: Affordances, ICTs and user control. Information, Communication and Society.

Best, K. (2008). The Effects of Mediation? Beyond the Construction of Consent in the War on Terror. In D. Grenfell & P. James (Eds.), Rethinking Insecurity and Violence: Beyond Savage Globalization. London: Routledge.

Lamey, A., & Best, K. (2008). Posner on the uselessness of moral theory: An empirical analysis. Teaching and Learning Forum 2008, Perth. Theory and Critique, 47(2), 213-235.

Best, K. (2006). Visceral hacking or packet wanking? The ethics of digital code. Culture, Theory and Critique, 47(2), 213-235.

Best, K. (2005). Celebrity.Com: Internet finance and frenzy at the millennium. Consumption, Markets & Culture, 8(4).

Best, K. (2005). Rethinking the globalization movement: Toward a cultural theory of contemporary democracy and communication. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2(3).

Lewis, J., & Best, K. (2005). Pure Filth: apocalyptic hedonism and the postmodern surfer. Scope, 2.

Best, K. (2004). Interfacing the environment: Networked screens and the ethics of visual consumption. Ethics and the Environment, 9(2).

Best, K,. (2004). Visual imaging technologies, embodied sympathy and control in the 9-11 wars, Global Insecurities, Melbourne.

Best, K. (2003). Beating them at their own game: the cultural politics of the open software movement and the gift economy. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 6(4), 449-470.

Best, K. (2003). The Hacker's Challenge: Active access to information, visceral democracy and discursive practice. Social Semiotics, 13(3), 263-282.

Best, K. (2003). Revisiting the Y2K Bug: Language Wars over Networking the Global Order. Television and New Media, 4(3), 297-319.

Lewis, J., & Best, K. (2003). The Electronic Polis: Media Democracy and the Invasion of Iraq. Reconstruction, 3(3).

Lewis, J., & Best, K. (2002). After Y2K: Time, Andre the Giant and other Democratic Avatars. In F. Sudweeks & C. Ess (Eds.), Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication. Murdoch: Murdoch University, 107-127.

Best, K., & Lewis, J. (2000). Hacking the Democratic Mainframe: The Melissa Virus and Transgressive Computing. Media International Australia (95, May), 207-226.

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